I've been spending a lot of time on the road as of late, meeting with a number of great companies with ideas and desires around mobility. While the focus during this time has been on Windows Mobile, the realization is that a lot of these same organizations also support RIM/Blackberry users and environments and (in some cases) are also considering Apple iPhone support as well. It is with this in mind that I (like so many others) paid close attention to yesterday's keynote speech at the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference ("WWDC"). As anticipated, much of the focus of the keynote was the announcement of the Apple iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 operating system.
From strictly a consumer perspective, the newest iPhone will undoubtedly create much buzz, interest and sales (and all very rightly so). I was, however, very focused on how this new iPhone incarnation would meet the demands of two specific groups -
- Enterprise application developers creating Line of Business applications for their enterprise workforce, and
- IT organizations charged with ensuring that mobile devices meet with security, compliance and support standards.
That being said, I was less than enthused about what was discussed yesterday regarding a device that has repeatedly been touted as "ready for the enterprise". Some reasons for my disappointment -
- The answer to the "no background processing for 3rd party applications" issue. For those of you that are unaware, the iPhone Software Development Kit ("SDK") for 3rd party application development almost immediately raised a "red flag" among developers several months ago when it was announced that no 3rd party applications would be allowed to run in the background. In other words - switching between your 3rd party application and another application would cause your application to shut down. From a data-centric application perspective, this could be devastating if extra application coding did not take place to persist data whenever the user switched applications. In a side note - Apple does allow their own applications to run as background processes; it's the 3rd party applications that cannot.
Yesterday's event found Scott Forstall addressing issue - sort of. Apparently, Apple perceived the background process issue as being important to developers of instant messaging solutions and not much else. The answer to the background process issue was apparently to respond with "background processes are bad." Specifically bad for battery life and performance. OK, I'll grant that, but gasoline-burning cars are bad for the environment. Does unilaterally banning them solve all your problems? What about the problems created by that decision? How about alternatives that do not cripple and potentially worsen the problem beyond the original issue?
Forstall did propose a solution (again, "sort of"). Apple is proposing an application server architecture (maintained by Apple) that apparently will allow an application to register and receive push notifications. I'm not sure if the scope of this even applies to anything other than the instant message developers, but even if it did it seems to leave a lot to be desired. My application would now rely on the occasionally-connected nature of the cellular world and the scalability and availability of a service outside of my direct control to provide me with an application "wake-up call". Listen - I have trouble trusting the hotel front desk for a wake-up call, and you are asking me to accept this proposed architecture for mission-critical applications? In the end, this whole topic and proposed solution came across as something similar to "We believe flying to a destination via commercial jet is very inefficient from a a resource perspective. So, here's a better solution - a giant catapult..." 
- Enterprise Line of Business application distribution. A few months back, Apple acknowledged that the consumer-focused application distribution model of the Apple AppStore would not work for most enterprise IT organizations wishing to control distribution of their home-grown applications. Apple is allowing distribution of applications through their corporate intranet, and these applications will be synced to the iPhone - using iTunes. So if I understand this correctly, Apple will require iTunes on enterprise computers? Was anyone at Apple ever talked to a real IT organization responsible for regulatory compliance and security auditing? Wow - I see this as a MAJOR show-stopper for a lot of organizations.
- Device provisioning/configuration. This is one area that I do give Apple some credit with, if for nothing more than clarifying what can be configured via both Exchange Server and Exchange Active Sync (note to Phil Schiller, Apple's VP of Worldwide Marketing - before you bash a technology like "ActiveStink", spend 5 minutes to ensure that your company hasn't licensed the technology as a cornerstone in a major market push. My 7 year-old son thanks you for making him look mature) and Apple's Configuration utility. Essentially, the iPhone will be configurable from an Exchange policy enforcement perspective in the areas of Remote Wipe and Password policies. Other configurable areas can be performed using an Apple-supplied GUI tool that creates the appropriate configuration for distribution via either website or e-mail attachment. If you are interested in more information around this, you can visit Apple's iPhone Enterprise Integration web site for the details.
While I would like to see a larger expansion of policies over time and more information on the configuration internals (is the device provisioning OMA-DM compliant, for example), there is some tangible progress here.
All in all, Apple is making some attempts to address the issues most relevant to the eventual "go or no-go" people in the enterprise world. I really do think a lot of the issues here could be resolved if Apple gains a better understanding of the needs of these IT organizations. Apple has (and likely will always be) a consumer-focused company. Unfortunately, those consumers can only demand so much of their employers when it comes to making iPhones (and other Apple hardware, for that matter) "corporate computing citizens". If sometimes rigid (and often very legal) standards cannot be met to guarantee the security, integrity and management of iPhones, acceptance will end at the front door.
On a related note - Peter Burrows has written a wonderful piece on Apple and the Enterprise for Business Week entitled "The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit". It really does talk to so much of what I believe are the root problems with Apple and the enterprise today.